


swollen shut

by Aris



Category: Devilman (Anime & Manga), Devilman Crybaby - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Study, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, now thats what i call trash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-12
Updated: 2018-01-12
Packaged: 2019-03-03 18:01:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13346556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aris/pseuds/Aris
Summary: It is something he cannot learn, not in its entirety. He plays a sick mimic. A hollow reenactment. He shares his lunch. He smiles. When it’s not Akira, it is never the same. He gives his bread to birds, and he goes home hungry. He drinks what makes his colleagues smile and laugh and flush and he only feels deeper, stronger, that where others hold blood, he is host to rot.Beneath his skin there are graveyards. Corpse dirt.





	swollen shut

**Author's Note:**

> hi mtv i refuse to reread this after writing so it doesnt make sense welcome to my crib

There is a curious absence, he finds.

He studies, as he does with everything. Observes, takes notes, reads books on fantasy, crime, romance. Peeks over the top of novels to classrooms and playgrounds, straight mouth tucked away beneath a pulled-high turtle neck. 

Others, he has learnt - and only ever learnt - experience a spectrum of life he is viciously ignorant to. Something he cannot find in a library, conceptualise in an algorithm, come to with logic. There are leaps in these novels he reads, moments where they jump from one choice to another, riding purely on a  _feeling_. Something which is never explained nor broken down, a plot point that is a given, there to be understood.  

The reviews on the book cover say;  _heart wrenching_. They say,  _I have never cried so hard._  They say,  _nothing can match this sorrow._

The main character died. She was always going to die. She was diagnosed in chapter one, coughed blood in chapter nine, could barely walk by her husbands side by chapter sixteen. Ryou thinks of kittens in boxes, rain at his neck, soaked in anothers. 

He doesn’t understand. She was going to die, the kitten was going to die. That sandcastle at the beach was made to be swallowed, toys to be broken, sunny days to give way to rain. Entropy - the natural state of the universe. The measure of chaos, decay, the tendency of energy to disperse. It is a tangible thing. 

Blood under ones nails, the sensation of shivering, heedy mortality at the body of a being so small held between your palms. Every brisk beat of the heart a tiny pin to your skin, their warmth ripped from their skin to yours, to the wind, to the universe.

The smell of death. Infection. It was going to die, he knew, it was going to die, but Akira saved it anyway. A contested use of the word, but one he insisted again and again -  _I’m going to save you_. He told the kitten. It didn’t understand. How cruel to give so much, and be given nothing back. How cruel of the kitten to die, after that, to spit in his face. 

_You’re crying, too._

Often, Ryou remembers that kitten. 

A case study in empathy - he thought, well. It’s going to die anyway, better to stop it suffering. He had read that somewhere. He thought Akira might have, too. But he cried, and the kitten shook and shook and the next morning was a corpse in a box on a cliff.  Ryou practised cutting the kittens throat on stuffed toys, on ferns, clay. 

Just in case.

Theory is different in application. Ryou doesn’t act again - he watches. It is awfully how horribly different each person is. There is no one set of rules, just an arbitrary presence of excessive emotion that, if not expressed, is tapped out against a thigh or bitten into a lip. Under the surface. Ryou so hates it.

He decides, like most things, that he will start with Akira. He is extreme in almost everything - gives too much with no sense, cries too much at that which does not effect him, laughs at jokes he doesn’t understand, smiles with those he doesn’t know and loves, with a terrifying ferocity, those who cannot love back.

(They buried the kitten beneath the cliff. Akira cried, and cried, and Ryou told him its body would be ground down to corpse dust in the sand, blood in the waves. It was a romanticised line, and only tenuously true. He supposes, there is something to the idea that things do not truly die, if they are incorporated elsewhere. 

Akira hadn’t smiled, or stopped crying, but against his shoulder, he did not shudder.)

 

//

 

Ryou shares his lunch with Akira. He never eats enough, gives his bread to birds and fish to cats. Ryou smiles at him, feels blind against what is given in return. It is, he comes to realise, not enough to give Akira pieces where he gives worlds. That Akira would serve his being up on a platter to Ryou without so much as crumb from him. 

Akira is entropy in motion in the most selfless of ways. In the most beautiful ways, a poet would say, maybe. And Ryou might see it, in the skin around his lips, stretched to accommodate a smile that is somehow coming from the eyes. A gratefulness explained in a shoulder tilt, a warmness offered in the curve of a hand. Words, feelings, left out on pedestals for Ryou to stray between - a shadow amongst a light.

He likes that best, in his own selfish way. Akira is light, and Ryou is shadow - in so that, Ryou will always be with Akira. Will always be at his side, beneath and above, but always different.

His absence. The void where he cannot fit that which others need not search for. Less curious, and more daunting. Goosebumps on his cold skin, hanging from a window, nails against a chest that only echos. He practices, a kittens neck, against that which does not feel. Which can not give back. How stupid. How cruel.

It is something he cannot learn, not in its entirety. He plays a sick mimic. A hollow reenactment. He shares his lunch. He smiles. When it’s not Akira, it is never the same. He gives his bread to birds, and he goes home hungry. He drinks what makes his colleagues smile and laugh and flush, and he only feels deeper, stronger, that where others hold blood, he is host to rot. 

Beneath his skin there are graveyards. Corpse dirt. 

The novels must be getting to him.

 

//

 

Not once, does Akira ask for more.

He does not pry at the edges of his lips for a smile, poke his side a laugh, pull something from him which he cannot part with. There is some energy in the universe so inexorably tied up into a point so small it cannot escape. Ryou is that point. Where the warmth of Akira’s hands disappears into too, where his love is swallowed whole, where entropy becomes, once again, a cold and dark creature. Freely given, forcibly removed.

Akira shares his lunch with Ryou. They eat it on the balcony of Ryou’s apartment. It’s ramen, cheap, and Ryou could do much better himself - but he takes. From Akira. Always. And it feels like more than he can give back. And he must, for as much as the universe depends on entropy to blight all to the tomb, it requires from them a tipping of the scale, an equilibrium. Equal, opposite reactions. 

If all expired and gave and decayed as Akira, there would be nothing but black holes in every corner of earth. The space where earth was. The nothing.

He serves wine. Akira hates it. It was 100,000 yen, and it barely covers the joy Akira grins against his skin, full and happy, eyes on the skyline. There is trust in the ripple of his spine to his arm, comfort in the way he shamelessly shifts into a soft space to stare up into the sky, safe in his belief that moment belongs between them. A side which Akira does not give to others.

The most expensive wine in the world would certainly do nothing for the ache of something setting into place in his fragile ribcage, a splendid, treasured awakening that knocks the breath from his chest, replaces it with a devotion so deep he may never breathe again.

_You're crying, too._

He tangles his hand in his Akira’s hair, feels the pull of tiny strands break and the silky grip against his knuckles chase his blood from the surface. It’s gentle.

What sits against his heart now feels - too big. Malignant in its foreignness. But, the sunset is warm on his wrist. His head is light and his tongue covered in a coat of grease he will never quite scrape off. It’s perfect. More so than any equation, any string of logic. If this is infection, if this is entropy, then let it be. Equilibrium be fucked.

Ryou knows; he will never understand how others feel. And that’s fine.

Because no one will feel this sun in quite this way ever again, for it falls from the slide of Akira’s skin on his, lives in smiles meant for _Ryou_ , laughs and tears and angry words for  _Ryou_. Something others will never know to miss. Will only feel an absence for. Something he hopes they hunger for. Suffer for. Agonise over, like his own, younger self.

It is, he finds, relaxing against the lounger, quite fair.

**Author's Note:**

> [rebloggable here](https://ariswrites.tumblr.com/post/169618581551/swollen-shut-ao3-ryouakira-ryou-character)


End file.
